IMG Artists Welcomes Pianist Jonathan Biss for European Management

6 Sep, 2016

IMG Artists is delighted to announce that it has signed acclaimed pianist Jonathan Biss for European Management. Jonathan will be represented by Vice President and Artist Manager Naomi Ives from the company’s London office. Kathryn Enticott, of Enticott Music Management, will work in association with Naomi and Jonathan on a consultancy basis.

Jonathan shares his talent and intellectual curiosity with classical music lovers in the concert hall and beyond and is an artist who is deeply committed to furthering the understanding of music through imaginative and collaborative programming. His notes and essays similarly display a vibrant intelligence and innate understanding of music and musicians. This season, he demonstrates these passions through two major endeavours that combine performance with scholarly examination.

Now in its second year, Jonathan’s Beethoven/5 project is a five year program devised with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra for which five composers have each been co-commissioned to write a new piano concerto inspired by one of Beethoven’s five piano concerti. This ambitious project began last season with Biss giving the world premiere of Timo Andres’ The Blind Banister, which has since been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. This season sees him and the SPCO giving the premiere of Sally Beamish’s concerto, paired with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1. He will then perform the work with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The following three seasons will see him premiere concerti by Salvatore Sciarrino, Caroline Shaw and Brett Dean.

This season, Biss celebrates a composer’s “late style” through a series of concerts for both solo piano and in collaboration with the Brentano Quartet and Mark Padmore. Following in-depth exploration, he has curated programmes of the later works of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Elgar, Gesualdo, Kurtag, Mozart, Schubert and Schumann. The Late Style concerts will be performed at Carnegie Hall, San Francisco Performances, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, London’s Barbican Centre and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and includes a series of masterclasses at Carnegie Hall and the Guildhall School of Music, as well as a Kindle Single to be published in January 2017.

Jonathan said, “I’m very happy to be beginning this new relationship with IMG Artists and to be working with Naomi Ives and Kathryn Enticott. We’ve already had a number of stimulating conversations about plans and projects, and I look forward to many years’ worth of those to come!”

Naomi said: “I’ve always been a huge fan of Jonathan’s performances. His creativity extends well past the concert platform and I am so excited to have the opportunity to be working with him on his projects which I find truly inspiring.”

Jonathan Biss studied at Indiana University and at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he joined the piano faculty in 2010. He devised and led the first MOOC (massive open online course) offered by a classical music conservatory, Exploring Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, which has reached more than 150,000 people in 185 countries, and he will continue to add lectures until he covers all the sonatas. His bestselling eBook, Beethoven’s Shadow, published by RosettaBooks in 2011, was the first Kindle Single written by a classical musician.